2016 Droidcon IT recap
I attended the 2016 Droidcon conference in Turin (Italy) with my colleague Rocco.
I was exited because of the feedback my colleague Marco gave us from last year. His words put my expectation very high.
Where
The conference was hosted inside Lingotto Centro Congressi in Turin. If you came from outside the country, Turin is not super easy to reach but from Italy (and from Venice in my case) was fine, just a train. Then moving around is super easy and the city is beautiful. Never forget about food. Amazing!
What
2 days, 4 parallels tracks each day… a ton of options to listen to. From UX to code design, from security to side project management.
Great talks from great people from all around the world. Main topics was UX, optimization (from layout to dex method count) and code design.
The best for me were talks about UX, interaction between Designers and Developers and layout optimizations.
#PerfMatter for Android
slides: https://speakerdeck.com/alosdev/perfmatters-for-android-droidcon-tunis-2016
Many small details can let you stay below the 16ms limit for a fluid experience on Android. You need to consider any possible optimization.
Some interesting stats that Hasan told us
- 61% of user leave an app if it takes more than 4 seconds to start and 49% if it takes just more than 2 seconds
- 80% of user unistall an app after 3 faulty runs of it.
Engage and retain users in the Android world
slides: http://www.slideshare.net/MatteoBonifazi/engage-and-retain-users-in-the-android-world-droidcon-italy-2016?from_m_app=android
32% of users download an app because friends and family suggest it. It’s more than search engines (17%) or appstore search (24%). That’s why you should consider introducing App Invites (available with Google Play Services), a way to let users share an app that is cross platform (iOS and Android), allows to setup a personalized onboarding flow and it’s fully integrated with Google Analytics.
Plus, to make the user returns inside the app, consider implementi App Indexing so you app can be launched from a Google Search.
How to Talk to Your Users
slides: https://speakerdeck.com/anothem/how-to-talk-to-your-users
Asking to your users things about your product or idea is not an easy task. Why?
Everyone lies
So it’s important ask the right questions to discover real things and be objective about the results you got.
A/B testing is a different beast because it requires you to build something (and so are on some assumptions). If you’re in early stages, you can’t do that.
and what about wear ?
I attended a few talks about wear but I still cannot find any “good reasons” or examples for developing on this platform.
It seams nobody have found a real value “on your wrist”, yet.
All Conference slides
- Hinting around: text demystified by Eugenio Marletti, Sebastiano Poggi
- Distribute your libraries via Maven, even privately by Jeroen Mols
- Think like a designer by Nick Butcher
- Let it flow by Benjamin Augustin
- #Perfmatters for Android by Hasan Hosgel
- Android Library A-Z by Martin Liersch
- The bytecode mumbo-jumbo by Raimon Ràfols
- To ∞ (~65K) and beyond! by Sebastiano Gottardo
- Android data binding in action using MVVM pattern by Fabio Collini
- From Clockwork to smartwatch by Daniele Bonaldo
- Android internal library management by Kelly Shuster
- Reverse engineering is not just for hackers by Jon Reeve
- How to talk to your users by Alex Florescu
- Crafting Great Hypotheses by Hoang Huynh
- Building maintainable app with MVP and Dagger2 by Kristijan Jurković
- Build An Efficient REST Client On Android by Matteo Gazzurelli
- Chronicles of TDD by Luca Falsina
- Backend 4 Android developers by Antonio Mallia & Nicola Corti
- A realtime infrastructure for Android apps: Firebase may be what you need..and even more! by Alessandro Martellucci
- Evolving the Android core with Aspects by Carlo Pescio
- Android: It’s time to go to work! by Pietro Maggi
- Drive together not the same by Giovanni Laquidara
- A friend in need - A JS indeed by Yonatan Levin
- Application Architecture for Scaled Agile by Sangsoo Nam
- FLUX based clean architecure by Luca Bruzzone
- Engage and retain users in android world by Matteo Bonifazi
- Bonjour Android, it’s Zeroconf by Roberto Orgiu
- We’re all UX! by Lydia Selimalhigazi and Caroline Smith
- Mastering the NDK by Xavier Hallade
Conclusions
All in all this conference let us know we’re doing great on Android. We’re fluent with the main and best technologies available and we haven’t loose something important during the last year of development.
We can still improve for course, from code design, tools to use and internal workflow. And we will!
My colleague wrote his own wrap-up post on Medium. Go and check it out!
Alessandro